Santiago Borja

Santiago Borja was born in Mexico City in 1970, where he currently lives and works.

Santiago Borja’s work lies at the intersection of art, architecture, and anthropology. Drawing on these three disciplines, the artist establishes unexpected connections and reveals new relationships grounded in subjective associations.

At Atelier Calder, Borja transformed the studio space by installing a complex wooden structure covered with a wool rug. This structure was conceived from totemic kinship relationships, represented by the Totemic Operator diagram published by Claude Lévi-Strauss in The Savage Mind (1962). By incorporating this installation into the studio, the artist also created a cultural collision. Made from an ancestral weaving technique, the rug combined motifs drawn from a traditional Mexican repertoire with those developed in the Bauhaus weaving workshops in the early twentieth century.